Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Cloud Computing: A Security Outlook

A 'cloud' in computing environment is the combination of Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) components. Well, most of us may confuse it with ASP (Application Service Provisioning) strategy, which is completely wrong. In simple terms, cloud is a virtualized, dynamically scalable, shared fabric and shared hardware solution to the users. It avoids capital expenditure (CapEx) on purchasing expensive hardware, software and other services by renting the usage from a third-party provider under SLA (Service-level Agreement). For more information, a cloud taxonomy is attached below.

When taking insights of security within Cloud Computing domain give a clear view of risks involved from consistency, interoperability, confidentiality, availability and integrity point of view, such as:

Hence, before approaching any cloud computing vendor its better to investigate their policies and procedures regarding security of your company's data transactions. This can be analyzed on the following basis:

-Data segregation and use of strong encryption technology-Data hosting location-Recognized under industry standards and regulatory compliance.-Disaster recovery and business continuity assurance-Privileged access control-Availability of resources and data-Viability of data in case if the vendor goes out of business

A good set of cloud service can be differentiated under agility, sustainability, cost, multi-tenancy, reliability, scalability and security. Additionally, from security perspective, a 'focused penetration testing' may rest assure a vendor from any false sense of security and thus save the cost of any data loss or liability issues.

For more information on current security initiatives, visit:[1]Cloud Security Alliance - http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org[2]ENISA Cloud Security Working Group - http://www.enisa.europa.eu